Startup Weekend and the Founding of HelpHookup

Words and Photos by Julie Blaustein

I am now the founder of the company HelpHookup, and it all took place within a mere 54 hours! It happened with 132 tech loving folks who spent the weekend creating the startup. We started with over 54 ideas on Friday night and through much debate we finally agreed on a community response website that would include a Facebook application to help people connect and find volunteer opportunities in their local community.

C\
San Francisco host Tyler Willis and Founder of Startup Weekend, Andrew Hyde

Startup Weekend, the creation of Andrew Hyde, is a social experiment which locks a team of strangers in a room and asks them to create the magic of creating a startup within 54 hours. It has been a success in 10 cities so far including Boulder, Toronto, Hamburg (Germany), NYC, Houston, W. Lafyette, Boston, DC, Chapel Hill, Atlanta and a number slated to be happening in the next couple of weeks. The San Francisco edition was hosted by Tyler Willis who provided incredible energy and facilitation to the ambitious project that was chosen. One that will improve the way people help pair volunteers with the events that matter to them.

Developers, designers, business consultants, public relations teams all sat side by side in a room about the size of Bill Gates’ bathroom, furiously creating a product that was launched by Sunday, Nov. 18 at midnight. Every hour or so there would be an update that lasted for 7 minutes and 7 minutes only from each of the team to learn where they were heading. The business development team broke out into the “war room” to white boarded ideas. The developer group formed an assembly line of laptops and crunched out code, the facebook application and the website all simultaneously. The designers created the logos and the design of the website. Usability experts mapped out how the experience would be for the users. PR & Marketing folks created blogs, spread the word and made us news on Tech Crunch! Our sole lawyer, with the help of 4 lawyers from Orrick who donated their time, incorporated us and created our terms of service. It was an incredible amount of brainpower collaborating together in a short time and with one goal in mind, the creation of HelpHookup that only a few hours ago was just an idea. The entire production was even video taped.

Hosted at Microsoft’s office in downtown San Francisco, this weekend shows that even large corporations look to startups for innovation, said Anand Iyer, spokesperson for Microsoft. “This is about how we can better engage in the community and strengthen our ties to technologists,” Iyer said. “We are close to Silicon Valley, the heart of startups and innovation, and we see the startup community as one we want to continue to engage with.” While Andrew Hyde does not think these weekends are the future of the business world, they are part of the future. “The relationships that are created here are what you need to watch out for.” He sees this as being about community and building relationships, then building a company.

Check out HelpHookup. To keep tabs of our progress after this weekend, log onto our blog, flickr or twitter for periodic updates. Looking forward to hooking you up for good with you all!

Tags: Startup+Weekend, HelpHookup, Microsoft, Andrew+Hyde, TechCrunch